Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Role and Value of Human-Curated Directories

  • Many see ooh.directory as a welcome, nostalgic return to human curation amid fears of “AI slop” overwhelming the web.
  • Curated directories are framed as a way to escape SEO-driven content and find genuine niche expertise.
  • Some are skeptical whether directories see real use, preferring search engines or aggregators, but others report immediately finding “wow” blogs and even setting it as a homepage.

Opacity, Scope, and “Entitlement” Debate

  • Multiple commenters complain that submissions vanish into an opaque review process with no feedback, leading to frustration.
  • The maintainer states it’s a personal, hobby project: entries are added when time allows, based on interest, recency, and diversity, with a large backlog of suggestions.
  • Tension arises between users who want transparency, acknowledgements, or community governance, and those defending the right of a single curator to exercise taste without explanation.
  • One critic later softens, acknowledging they took rejections too personally and apologizing.

Curation Style: Personal vs Community and Anti-Slop

  • Some want a more “community-ish” directory with shared decision-making; others argue that would quickly be overrun by low-quality or AI-generated content and is hard to govern.
  • The maintainer explicitly tries to avoid overrepresentation of tech blogs (especially rarely updated ones by men about computers), aiming for broad, non-tech diversity.
  • Comparisons are made to DMOZ (similarly opaque) and to sites like Hacker News or MetaFilter as community-driven alternatives.

UX, Taxonomy, and Features

  • Suggestions include sorting by last-updated or popularity instead of (or in addition to) alphabetical, randomization for discovery, and clearer algorithmic transparency.
  • The maintainer prefers alphabetical as an intuitive default but is open to more sort options if they don’t overcomplicate the UI.
  • Issues discussed: shifting blog topics over time, fuzzy blog vs newsletter distinctions, desire for paywall filters, and RSS feeds for recent additions (which already exist).

Alternatives and Related Projects

  • Mentioned alternatives: webrings (including “no AI” rings), minifeed.net, Kagi Small Web, marginalia-search, blogs.hn, HN- or country-specific blog collections, personal blogroll pages, and HN-based blog aggregations.
  • Some highlight Emacs-specific feeds and RSS-based discovery as parallel ecosystems.